Love's Labor*: A Review of To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann by Gail A. Hornstein. New York:  The Free Press, 2000,  xxxii + 478 pages.

Readers of Contemporary Psychoanalysis are likely to be fascinated by Gail A. Hornstein's engaging and comprehensive life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, M.D. (1889-1957), the psychiatrist-psychoanalyst whose legendary work with psychotic patients at Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland, and whose book, Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy (1950), made her a widely celebrated and at times harshly criticized analyst and teacher. She was a cofounder, with Dexter Bullard and Harry Stack Sullivan, of the Washington School of Psychiatry, an original member of the core teaching faculty of the White Institute, a past president of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, and the fictionalized “Dr. Fried” in Joanne Greenberg's novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964).

This biography is captivating, largely as the result of its source material. Because of World War II, next to nothing survives in Europe to document the first forty-six years of Fromm-Reichmann's life. Hornstein interviewed Fromm-Reichmann's only surviving relative, her niece, Alisa Jacobson Fuchs, and listened to a set of autobiographical reminiscences that Fromm-Reichmann audiotaped the year before her death. She was able to review extant letters, drafts, notes, records, and audiotape recordings, written or spoken by Fromm-Reichmann or sent to her. Over a period of five years she immersed herself in the offices, basement, attic, and storerooms of Chestnut Lodge, studying Fromm-Reichmann's clinical work in multiple forms—progress notes, tape recordings, verbatim transcripts of psychotherapy sessions, case conferences, clinical notes, and correspondence. She interviewed Joanne Greenberg extensively. She got to know former members of the Chestnut Lodge staff, the nurses, Fromm-Reichmann's secretaries, many of her friends. In all, she devoted more than a decade of her life to the research and writing the book required.